Lesson 7: Stillness

The old people of the Shore of Lamps say that the wind never sleeps on the northern sea, because the Wind Mother lives in a cave at the top of the world and breathes out the gales without ever stopping, and so a ship that goes north may be wrecked, frozen or lost, but she will never lie still.

You grew up believing it, as everyone does, and so when you wake at the first grey light of the tenth day and lift your head from the wet planks, you think for a moment that you are still dreaming. There is no sound of water along the hull. There is no creak of the yard. The sail hangs from it as straight and dead as a blanket hung out to dry, and beyond the rail, in every direction, the sea lies flat and shining under a pale sky, as if the whole northern ocean had been poured into a mould and left to set.

The sea lies as flat as polished bronze

You have seen calm water before, in the harbour at home on a summer evening, but you have never seen the open sea like this.

The long swell is still there, so low and so slow that you feel it more than see it, a gentle lifting and settling of the whole ship as though the sea were breathing in its sleep. But the skin of the water is perfectly smooth. It takes the colour of the sky and gives it back without a ripple, so that the line where the sea ends and the sky begins is lost in a band of soft white haze, and the Heron seems to float in the air with nothing above or below her. A fulmar sits on the water a stone’s throw from the rail, and its reflection sits beneath it, upside down and perfect, and when it dips its beak to drink, the two birds touch. When you lean over the side, your own face looks back at you, pale and tired and surprised. The cold comes up from the water rather than down from the air, and it settles in your fingers and the soles of your feet, though the sun on your neck is almost warm.

Everyone aboard is waking now, and you can see the same surprise pass from face to face along the benches. Nobody speaks loudly. It is as though the silence of the sea had come aboard in the night and taken the voices of the crew for itself.

What the Old Song Says

Dunn is the first to sing, as he always is, but this morning he sings in a thin voice, almost to himself, the verse of the Song of the Northern Way that every sailor knows by heart: “The Mother breathes in her northern cave, and her breath is never still; when the sea lies down like a sleeping dog, then the Mother lies down too, and no ship comes home.”

The crew believes that the verse means exactly what it says. If the wind never sleeps in the north, then a calm in the north is not weather but a sign, and the sign can only mean that the Wind Mother herself has fallen still, from age or from anger or from death, and that every ship upon her sea is now as good as lost. You hear Lise whisper that her grandmother told of a crew who lay becalmed until they ate their boots. You hear Bran tell her, more roughly than he means to, to be quiet.

Ingrith hears the verse too. She is sitting by the chart table with her back against the stern post and her cloak drawn round her shoulders, and she only says, without opening her eyes, “The song says the sea lies down like a sleeping dog. Dogs wake.”

Wenna finds four black sails on the rim

When the sun has climbed clear of the haze, Askel sends Wenna to the masthead, and she goes up the mast quickly, her bare feet finding the cleats, and settles herself on the yard with one arm around the mast. For a long time she says nothing, turning slowly, shading her eyes with her free hand. Then she points, and calls down in a voice that is quieter than you have ever heard from her.

“Four sails. South-east, on the very edge. Black. They are not moving either.”

You climb up after her, because Ingrith nods to you to go, and when you reach the yard, Wenna takes your hand and lays it along the line of her arm so that you can follow her pointing. At first you see nothing but the white haze. Then you see them: four tiny dark marks low on the rim of the sea, so small and so far that they might be birds sitting on the water, except that they do not move and birds do. They are as far off as a strong crew could row in half a day, perhaps a little more. They hang there in the same dead air that holds the Heron, and you know that somewhere on the deck of the largest of them, Morvane is standing at the rail and looking north, toward a small pale mark that is your own sail.

When you come down, Ingrith asks you only one question. “Are they rowing?”

You tell her that they are not, that their sails hang like yours, and that they have not moved in all the time you watched. She nods slowly, as a player nods when the other player has made the move that she expected. He found the north-east empty when the fog thinned, she says, and turned back to sweep the water behind him, as she thought he would.

Askel wants to row while the hunters sit

Askel does not wait for the crew to finish talking. He comes aft and stands before Ingrith with his feet planted wide, and he speaks to her in a low, hard voice, the voice of a man who has made up his mind and wants only to be told that he is right.

“We row now,” he says. “While they sit. Every hour we row and they do not is an hour’s distance between us. By evening we could have them under the rim again, and in the night we could turn west and lose them.”

Ingrith opens her eyes and looks up at him for a long moment with the good one. “And if he rows too?”

“Then we row harder.”

“He has four ships, Askel, and many more oars than we have, and fresh men to change at the benches. We have one ship and one crew, and our water is not endless. If we row first, he will row after us, and we will tire first, because we started first. Look at him. He is not rowing. Why do you think that is?”

Askel looks south-east, though from the deck there is nothing to see. “He is waiting to see what we do.”

“Yes. He is like a wrestler who stands with his hands on your shoulders and does not push, so that you will push first and he can feel which way your weight is going. If we row north, he will know we mean to go north. If we row west, he will know we mean to go west. While we lie still, he knows nothing at all, and he must guess, and every guess costs him something.” She closes her eyes again. “Let the men rest. Let them eat a little and drink a little and sleep. If there is rowing to be done, it will be done better by men who slept today.”

Askel stands over her for a moment longer, and you see his jaw working as though he were chewing words he will not let out. Then he turns away and goes forward, and you hear him tell the crew to rest, in a voice that is quite steady. Later, when he passes you by the mast, he says, very quietly, so that nobody else can hear, “I do not like it. But I think she is right, and I hate that more.” You have never heard a captain say such a thing, and you find that you trust him more for it, not less.

Fear moves through the ship like cold water

The morning passes, and then the noon, and the sea does not change.

Fear does not come aboard all at once. It seeps in slowly, like cold water through a seam that Lise has not yet found, and you feel it rising hour by hour along the benches. The men who have been told to sleep do not sleep. They sit with their arms around their knees and stare at the flat sea, or they talk in low voices about the Wind Mother and her cave, about calms that lasted a whole moon, about ships found drifting with nobody aboard. Dunn counts the water casks twice before noon, and both times he says nothing. Bran gets up and walks the length of the ship and back, and then does it again, and then sits down and stands up again, like a runner kept waiting too long at the start of a race. One of the younger rowers begins to whistle softly, an old trick for calling up a wind, and two others take it up, until Askel tells them sharply to stop, and they stop, and the silence afterward is worse than the whistling.

Lise goes to the mast and scratches it with her knife, slowly, in long strokes, as fishermen do at home when the wind falls. When she turns and sees Ingrith watching her, she flushes, and puts the knife away.

“It does no harm,” Ingrith says to her, gently. “Scratch it if it helps you. But scratch it gently. We will want that mast again.”

Ingrith plays a slow game while the crew watches

In the middle of the afternoon, with the whole crew watching her and pretending not to, Ingrith calls you to the chart table, takes out the little board on which she plays her game of stones in the evenings, and sets out the pieces as calmly as if the Heron were tied up at the quay at home with a cask of ale in the shade beside her.

You play. You cannot help glancing south-east between moves, and you lose the first game quickly, because your mind is not on it. Ingrith sets the stones out again without a word, and you play again, and this time you make yourself look at the board, and slowly the game takes hold of you the way it always does, the small hard sound of each stone set down on the wood, the quiet pattern growing in the corners. Around you, you become aware that the ship is changing. The talk on the benches is dying away. One man leans forward to watch. Then another. Bran stops walking and sits down on the nearest bench with his chin on his fists, and watches the board as if it held the answer to everything.

It is only much later that you understand what she was doing. A navigator who is afraid can hide it in her voice and in her words, but she cannot hide it in her hands, and a whole crew watching an old woman set down small stones on a board, slowly and carefully, with hands that do not shake, will believe what the hands are telling them long before they would believe any speech. Ingrith never says that the wind will come back. She only plays the game to its end, wins it, and then lies down by the chart table with her cloak over her face, and sleeps. Within the hour, half the crew is asleep as well.

When she wakes, every idle hand is given a task

Ingrith wakes when the sun is low in the north-west, and she does not waste the waking. She sends Lise along the benches to look at every oar, and Lise comes back with two whose blades have split along the grain, and sits down at once with her pot of glue and her bronze clamps to mend them. She tells Bran to choose the rowers who will sit on each bench, the strong beside the steady, the fresh beside the tired, as a captain chooses the order of runners in a relay so that no two weak legs follow one another. She asks Dunn how much water is left, and listens to his answer without changing her face, and then tells him to give every person aboard one cup at sunset and not a mouthful more.

You watch the ship come back to life under her orders. It is not that anyone believes the wind will return; nobody does, yet. It is that a man with a split oar on his knees and a clamp in his hand has no room left in his head for the Wind Mother. By the time the light begins to fade, the talk along the benches is no longer about drifting ships and eaten boots, but about who will pull beside whom, and whose hands are hardest, and how long a crew can row before it must rest.

The Mark on the Chart

At sunset you take out the chart together and look for a long time at the mark you made the night before. You have not moved by the width of a fingernail. Ingrith makes you draw a small circle round the mark, the sign she uses for a ship lying still, and beside it a second small circle, far to the south-east, for the four black ships, with a short note of the distance as Wenna judged it. Then she makes you write in the log: Day ten. No wind from dawn to dusk. Sea glass, low swell from the north-west. Four black sails south-east on the rim, also still. We rested. A calm holds the hunter as fast as it holds the hunted.

The swell remembers a wind that has gone

When the log is written, Ingrith takes your hand and lays it flat on the top of the rail, and holds it there, and tells you to feel. You feel the swell lifting the ship, so slow and so gentle that you would not notice it unless you were waiting for it, and after a long while you feel that it is coming from the north-west, as it came yesterday, but more weakly, with a longer pause between each rise.

“That swell was made by a wind that blew far away, days ago,” she says. “The wind has gone, but the sea remembers it, the way the water of a rowing course still rocks long after the boats have gone by. And each day the sea remembers a little less. When the swell grows longer and lower like this, it means there is no new wind anywhere near to make a new one. So the calm is wide, not small. It may last for days. That is why I would not let Askel row today. You do not sprint at the start of a race when you do not know how long the course is.”

You ask her, because you cannot help it, whether the Wind Mother is dead.

Ingrith is quiet for so long that you think she has not heard. Then she says, “I have sailed on this sea for fifty summers, and I have lain in a calm before, though never one as long as this one is going to be. Whatever breathes the winds, it has always breathed again. But I did not stay alive for fifty summers by waiting for it to happen. I stayed alive by doing what could be done while I waited.”

Every sound carries across the glass

Night comes slowly, as it does in the north at the end of summer, the sky fading through rose and green to a deep clear grey that never quite becomes black. The sea takes every colour of the sky and holds it. The first stars come out, and each one has its twin in the water below, so that the Heron seems to hang in the middle of a great hollow globe of stars.

In the stillness, sounds travel farther than you would believe. You hear a seal surface somewhere far off to the north and blow out its breath. You hear the drip of a single drop of water falling from the yard into the sea, and the scrape of Dunn’s knife on a pot at the bow as clearly as if he stood at your elbow. If you can hear so much, you think, then sound must carry just as far the other way, and without meaning to you begin to speak in a whisper. And then, a little after the sun has gone, from far away in the south-east, so faint that only the stillness lets it reach you, you hear a sound you know.

It is the drum. Slow and steady, a heartbeat across the water. Wenna, at the masthead in the last of the light, calls down that the black sails have gone: one by one the four dark marks have shrunk to nothing against the dusk, as sails do when they are lowered from their yards. A ship that takes in her sail in a calm means to row.

Askel comes aft and looks at Ingrith, and he does not need to ask anything.

“He has waited all day for us to move, and we did not move,” Ingrith says. “So now he must move first, and in the dark, and he has told us so with his drum. Good. Let the crew sleep until the middle of the night. Then we will go to the benches, all of us, and we will learn whether his many oars can catch our few.” She turns to you, and in the starlight you see the faint shape of a smile. “Sleep too. The calm has taught you to wait. Tomorrow the oars will give you the next lesson, and it will be a hard one on the hands.”